A search engine surfaces billions of articles, images and videos (“content”) through its search engine. For various reasons (DMCA, privacy laws, content provider terms of service, etc.) people may have a desire or right to demand that some of the content surfaced by the search engine be taken down (i.e., made inaccessible on the Internet). Some people mistakenly believe that the search engine returning the results (surfaced content) owns this content and should be responsible for taking down inappropriate or personal content once users complain to the search engine and/or request that the content be taken down. This is a burden for a search engine, and overlooks the fact that a search engine crawls the web and indexes content that is publicly available and owned or controlled by a third party. In other words, the search engine does not actually own or control the content that it indexes. Therefore, the search engine cannot take down content from a content provider's servers, as those are owned and controlled by the content provider.
In addition, even after content has been removed through a takedown process by a content provider, it may take some time for the search engine to update its index to avoid surfacing the content that has been taken down.